NEWS POST: Bill Gates And Investors Launch US$1 Billion Fund To Fight Climate Change Through Energy Innovation

http://www.b-t.energy/ventures/

Bill Gates is leading a more than US$1 billion fund focused on fighting climate change by investing in clean energy innovation.

The Microsoft co-founder and his all-star line-up of fellow investors have announced the Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, which will begin making investments next year. The BEV fund, which has a 20-year duration, aims to invest in the commercialization of new technologies that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in areas including electricity generation and storage, transportation, industrial processes, agriculture, and energy-system efficiency.

“Anything that leads to cheap, clean, reliable energy we’re open-minded to,” says Gates, who is serving as chairman of BEV and anticipates being actively involved.

The directors of BEV include Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, former energy hedge fund manager John Arnold, and SAP cofounder Hasso Plattner. The combined net worth of the directors is nearly US$170 billion, based on estimates of their individual wealth by Bloomberg and Forbes.

Gates had last year announced his intention to personally invest an additional US$1 billion in clean energy technology. He was also among the 28 wealthy individuals and families signed on to the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group broadly committed to investing in this area. The new fund, which includes many of them, is a next, concrete step toward actually deploying their capital.

Gates says that he’s been surprised that technology innovation isn’t discussed more as a solution to climate change, since clean-energy advances could limit any economic trade-offs from switching off carbon-emitting fossil fuels. “All of that takes place just as a normal market mechanism as you replace energy sources with other ways to do it,” he says.

But a recent wave of clean energy technology investing turned out miserably for many venture capital investors, with one study estimating that VC firms invested over $25 billion from 2006 to 2011 and lost more than half that money. Institutional investment in this area has remained limited as a result, which Gates and his fellow investors describe as a market failure that large-scale, long-term private investments can address.

Gates acknowledges that investing in energy is harder than investing in information technology: “People think you can just put US$50 million in and wait two years and then you know what you got. In this energy space, that’s not true at all.”

But he adds that it’s an uncrowded investing field. “It’s such a big market that the value if you’re really providing a big portion of the world’s energy, the value of that will be super, super big.” BEV estimates the global energy market at $6 trillion, with energy demand increasing by one-third by 2040.

The BEV effort suits Gates’s nerdy interest in science research and experience investing in energy technology. He has personally made extensive investments in various energy technology companies over the years, including nuclear energy startup TerraPower, which he helped launch and where he serves as chairman. His US$1 billion investment pledge from last year spans investments he has made subsequently, this fund, and other investments he might make down the line.

Energy storage technology is among the areas where BEV will likely invest as part of a first wave, as more efficient and cheaper storage permits greater reliance on intermittent clean energy sources such as solar and wind power.

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg join tech titans to launch the Breakthrough Energy Coalition

One thesis driving the fund is that only governments have the resources to invest in fundamental research, through government labs and funding for university research, at a scale that is needed for breakthrough advances. Government funding in areas such as battery technology and materials used for solar power, for example, has seeded the growth of those areas, with their commercialization subsequently funded by private investors.

“You need investment to take things out of a research lab at a university like Stanford, or MIT, Berkeley, and many other places, or national labs, for example, they’re doing a lot of research,” says Arun Majumdar, a Stanford University professor who was the acting US undersecretary of Energy and is advising BEV.

Gates was involved in last year announcing an initiative called Mission Innovation, where 22 countries and the European Union aim to double investment in clean energy research over five years. The US is among those countries, but president-elect Donald Trump and his appointees have been vocal climate-change deniers and could potentially be skeptical of US investment in clean-energy technology.

“The dialogue with the new administration as it comes in about how they see energy research will be important,” Gates says. “The general idea that research is a good deal fortunately is not a partisan thing.”

The richest group of investors ever assembled?

Gates and his co-directors first convened at the Four Seasons hotel in Seattle in August for two days to hash out their approach to the fund, with Ma and Plattner conferencing in. Among the topics the group actively debated was whether there really was a good existing pipeline of companies to fund, and what that meant for how quickly they could invest, according to Arnold.

“Being a 20-year fund with patient capital that’s not needing short-term gains allows us to have a longer-term outlook as well as fund technologies that don’t fit into the traditional VC model as it exists today,” says Arnold.

The list of 20 initial investors in the fund is an even-more comprehensive catalog of the world’s richest and most powerful, including Kingdom Holding’s prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson, Bridgewater Associates’ Ray Dalio, African Rainbow Minerals’ Patrice Motsepe, Iliad Group’s Xavier Niel, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, and SOHO China’s Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi.

The directors are currently recruiting a management team for the fund, the core of which Gates hopes will be in place within about three months.

The fund, which won’t charge investors management fees beyond its operating costs, will likely start with a temporary office in the heart of the US venture capital industry on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. It’s expected that the size of the initial fund will increase, with more investors coming on board, and it’s possible that Breakthrough Energy Ventures eventually launches additional funds.

Gates says that the success of the effort for clean, reliable, affordable energy depends on deploying far more than the US$1 billion in capital committed to the BEV fund. He plans to work personally to get strategic partners such as energy companies involved in funding and supporting the promising technology breakthroughs.

Originally published on Quartz

NEWS POST: STI Apps May Have Inaccurate, Harmful Information

Image source: STD Triad

Of nearly 90 mobile phone apps focusing on sexually transmitted infections (STIs), about a third had inaccurate and incomplete information in a recent study.

This significant variation in content, quality and medical advice could lead to sexual health risks for those who search for answers online before talking to a doctor.

“Due to the stigmatized nature of STIs, apps could be a great medium for providing accurate information to those most at risk,” said lead author Jo Gibbs of the University College London Department of Infection and Population Health in the UK.

“However, there is very little guidance available for the consumer to assess the accuracy and quality of information provided by apps, and to identify and distinguish those which are likely to provide legitimate, trustworthy content,” she told Reuters Health.

In September 2014, the research team looked on Google Play and iTunes for STI and genital infection apps that featured information about testing, diagnosis and treatment. They analyzed 87 apps to see if they met the 19 principles of the Health on the Net Foundation, which require health apps to include medical qualifications, confidentiality, cited facts and contact information.

The team also compared diagnosis and treatment information in the apps to what’s offered on the United Kingdom (UK) National Health Service’s STI website.

About 29 percent of apps met more than six Health on the Net criteria, and content varied widely. About 39 percent, or 34 of 87 apps, covered one or two infections such as gonorrhea and genital warts, and 46 percent covered multiple STIs. Five apps focused on STI testing in particular.

Importantly, 13 apps were fully accurate, 46 were mostly accurate and 28 were partially accurate, the researchers report in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections.

Of the 87 apps examined, 25 contained more than one piece of potentially harmful information, for example, “certain medicinal herbs may also be beneficial in creating a strong immune response against HSV in non-infected partners,” or advice that getting treatment for genital warts will cause “a very bad time” and “will shatter your relationships.”

Apps that were available on both iOS and Android phones were more accurate than single-platform apps. In total, only one app provided completely accurate information about chlamydia, the most common STI in the UK. No apps contained documentation or citations.

Future studies could show how much has changed with STI app availability and accuracy since 2014, Gibbs noted.

“As with any review of apps, there is a lag between conducting the review and the results being published,” she said. “The landscape may have changed during this time.”

The UK National Health Service estimates 102 billion downloads of health-related apps worldwide. The organization plans to develop a library of endorsed apps for a variety of medical conditions in the future.

“This is definitely an important topic, and it’s great to see that an updated review has been done,” said Kate Muessig of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who wasn’t involved with the study. Gibbs and colleagues based the STI study methods on previous research that Muessig has conducted about HIV apps.

“Most available HIV/STD apps have failed to attract user attention and positive reviews,” Muessig and colleagues wrote in 2013. “Public health practitioners should work with app developers to incorporate elements” that reduce risk, improve app inclusiveness and increase interactivity.

In the meantime, smartphone users looking for STI information should probably stick to official online sources, Gibbs added.

“Although some of the apps we reviewed were of high quality, these were hard to identify,” she said. “We would recommend consumers looking for information on STIs to access endorsed health websites or their local sexual health services.”

Originally published on Reuters

NEWS POST: Fight Over Revolutionary Genetic Advance Goes To Court In US

The DNA double helix ©- (AFP)

A fierce legal battle over the patent for a revolutionary gene-editing technique played out Tuesday in a US court, with billions of dollars at stake.

The tool called CRISPR-Cas9 -- hailed as faster, cheaper and more accurate than current gene-snipping methods -- holds fabulous promise for applications in medicine and agriculture.

It is to genetics what word processors meant as progress compared to typewriters.

In one corner of the fight are two women regularly considered possible candidates for a Nobel prize: French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin and biochemist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley.

Opposing them is Feng Zhang, a leading light at the Broad Institute, a research facility affiliated with Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Both sides claim to have developed CRISPR-Cas9. It allows scientists to edit, with pinpoint accuracy, stretches of the genome by removing, adding or changing pieces of the DNA sequence.

Major medical labs and biotechnology companies see the technique as having stunning potential.

But critics worry over ethical concerns, such as changing DNA within reproductive cells, because these tweaks will be passed on from generation to generation.

The three scientists were represented by lawyers at the court in Alexandria, Virginia for a hearing that lasted less than 50 minutes.

Biochemist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley: Science magazine names CRISPR 'Breakthrough of the Year' | University of California

There is broad agreement that Charpentier and Doudna -- winners of many prizes in the past four years -- discovered this gene-editing technique that has raised so many hopes.

Their work was published in the journal Science in June 2012. But they described using CRISPR with simple organisms such as bacteria. They filed for a patent in May 2012.

The Broad Institute, with Zhang, filed a patent request in December 2012 for a successful test of CRISPR with eukaryotes -- more advanced organisms whose cells contain a nucleus with a membrane.

This step forward opened up vast possibilities for extending gene-editing to human cells.

The question before the three-judge panel Tuesday was whether Zhang benefited from the discovery of the other two scientists or was actually responsible for moving CRISPR forward as a technology.

"Dr Zhang had already started to work on it prior to" the publication of his rivals' work, said Steven Trybus, lawyer for the Broad Institute.

Quoting an interview that she gave, Trybus said Doudna "experienced many frustrations trying to get it in human cells."

A lawyer for the other side sought to dismiss any suggestion that his clients had failed.

Todd Walters, a lawyer for the University of California, said Doudna has granted hundreds of interviews and "there is no statement in the record that she believed that it wouldn't work in eukaryotic cells."

What will the judges do to attribute paternity for the discovery of the century in biotechnology?

They can decide that one side wins it all, or split things up by assigning some patents to both sides.

No decision is expected for weeks. But either way, CRISPR-Cas9 is destined to keep the world of genetics abuzz for a long time.

French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier attends a ceremony for the Doctors Honoris Causa honorary degrees, at the KU Leuven university in Belgium, in February 2016 ©Yorick Jansens (Belga/AFP)

Originally published on Daily Mail UK